Svetlana Alexievich

“War kills time, precious human time.”

“All our lives, we fight for certain ideals, and they get diluted, and then we have to fight for them again.”

“In the West, people demonize Putin. They do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West. There is a li...”

“In the post-Soviet era, instead of freedom, various stripes of autocratic-totalitarianism have flourished: Russian, Belarusian, Kazakh... We are finding our way out from under the debris of...”

“For me, people are like the black boxes found in the debris of airplane crashes.”

“Hatred will always give birth to more and more hate, and love has the power to demolish the borders between us.”

“'Women's' war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. There are no heroes and incredible feats; there are simply people who are busy doing inhuma...”

“I don't want to be like other authors and say that there are only a few story lines in literature. A story is like a human face. We have as many stories as human faces. You might have simila...”

“I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion.”

“Reality has always attracted me like a magnet; it tortured and hypnotized me. I wanted to capture it on paper.”

“My father was an important person, the director of the school. He could talk to anybody - simple or educated. He liked chess, fishing, and beautiful women.”

“I'm interested in little people. 'The little, great people' is how I would put it, because suffering expands people.”

“Freedom is not an instantaneous holiday, as we once dreamed. It is a road. A long road. We know this now.”

“We, people of socialism, are not like others. We have our peculiar ideas about heroes and martyrs.”

“I don't remember men in our village after World War II: during the war, one out of four Belarusians perished, either fighting at the front or with the partisans. After the war, we children l...”

“Many times, I have been shocked and frightened by human beings. I have experienced delight and revulsion. I have sometimes wanted to forget what I heard, to return to a time when I lived in...”

“We were romantics in the 1990s and thought that communism was dead. But 10 years passed, and Putin came, and it became obvious that the process is reversible; that communism will, to varying...”

“I don't hate. I love the Russian people. I love the Belarusan people... I love Ukraine very much.”

“I have collected the history of 'domestic,' 'indoor' socialism, bit by bit. The history of how it played out in the human soul. I am drawn to that small space called a human being... a singl...”

“Women are the most denigrated social group in the Soviet Union. The idea of women's emancipation is only a slogan in - but also, I should say, in many places outside - the Soviet Union. But...”